11th April 2006 Archive

What was it BT Wholesale chief exec Paul Reynolds said in May last year? "We are fully committed to seeing LLU a success. We are committed to continuing our work with the industry to improve the operational processes surrounding LLU."

Fujitsu revealed its pay scales to some of its UK staff on Friday allowing them to check for the first time if they are being paid the going rate - but employees not signed up to union Amicus will have to keep guessing.

Intel is set to stop shipping motherboards based on third-party chipsets, or at the very least significantly reduce its dependency on other companies' products, investment bank Friedman Billings, Ramsey Group (FBRG) has claimed.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera has captured its first colour image* of the Red Planet, snapped as part of a series of test images to calibrate the camera:

The Carphone Warehouse has fleshed out details of a new bundled broadband and phone service that is half the price of its nearest rival. The offer, which is being plugged as "free broadband forever" massively undercuts similar services from leading players such as AOL, BT, and cableco NTL:Telewest.

BenQ is to sell its optical drive operation to fellow Taiwanese manufacturer LiteOn IT. This gets it closer to shedding the last of its component businesses and focus entirely on end-user products, including phones, notebooks and consumer electronics equipment.

McAfee proudly proclaims itself "the largest dedicated [IT] security company in the world". Based on revenues this is a fair claim - it is some way ahead of closest rivals Check Point and Trend Micro for that crown. But is a dedicated security company really the best thing to be in 2006 and beyond?

Qinetiq, the former Ministry of Defence research lab, has been given chairmanship of a UK group designed to develop government security policy. The committee, which comprises government officials, academics, and other experts, will help inform UK government policy on issues such as the introduction of biometric-based identity cards and the establishment of ecommerce projects, the FT reports. ®

Fujitsu will this month ship a monster high-definition PC-TV hybrid that incorporates not only four TV tuners - two for digital and two for analogue broadcasts - but also twin 300GB hard drives and a dual-layer enabled Blu-ray Disc recorder.

Fans of the late Gene Pitney - who died last week of heart disease shortly after a gig in Cardiff - have been branded "money-grabbing" and "ghoulish" for expressing their dismay at the singer's demise in the traditional way - by offering any artifact they can get their hands on on eBay.

A hacker who's suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of euros from online bank accounts has been extradited from Argentina to Spain. José Manuel García Rodríguez, 24, dubbed (rather uncharitably) by the Argentinians as "the fat Spaniard", faces up to 40 years imprisonment if convicted of various cybercrime offences.

Fujitsu has announced the world's third notebook to incorporate an HD DVD drive, following the lead set by Toshiba and, more recently, Acer. However, the 17in machine is not expected to appear until June.

ATI has formally renamed its Radeon Xpress 200 chipset to CrossFire Xpress 1600, the company's website reveals. Such a move had been anticipated - a number of motherboard makers have already begun cutting and pasting the new name into existing product documentation.

A group of IT academics have sent an open letter to the House of Commons Health Select Committee asking them to set up an independent audit of how the programme to modernise IT within the health service is going.

The US has told China to get its environmental act togther ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, saying that "the world was watching its environmental protection efforts" in the run-up to the sportsfest.

ATI is preparing to release a cut-down version of its Radeon X1900 XT and XTX GPUs, reducing the chip's pixel shader complement from 48 to 36 and knocking back its clock speed. The part will ship as the Radeon X1900 GT, it has been claimed.

The Venus Express orbiter successfully completed its voyage to our inner neighbour this morning with a handbrake turn. Engineers fired up rockets to slow it down so that Venus' gravity could capture the European Space Agency probe.

A team of US scientists has come up with a plausible explanation for "near death" events, wherein individuals experience out-of-body sensations or an aura of clear white light - and it has nothing to do with ascending toward the pearly gates.

Sonos will this month cut the price of its multi-room digital music system. Its latest ZonePlayer wireless playback device, the ZP80, provides the same core functionality as Sonos' ZP100. However, to get the price - and the size - down, Sonos has stripped out the integrated amplifier used to drive speakers directly from the ZonePlayer.

The NY subway pervert who exposed his meat to a 22-year-old web developer - only to be caught mid-five-knuckle-shuffle on her mobile's camera and subsequently splashed across the net - has revealed his true colours in an astounding interview with New York Magazine.

Samsung has shown off a mobile phone that's little bigger than a credit card. The ultra-slim handset - dubbed the Platinum Cardphone but more labelled with the more prosaic model number SCH-V870 - measures just 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9cm and weighs 81g.

Security watchers have uncovered proof-of-concept (POC) malware that's capable (at least theoretically) of infecting either Windows or Linux PCs. Linux-Bi-A/Win-Bi-A is written in assembler so it is capable of infecting either Linux ELF binaries or Windows exe files.

Government vets say the swan found to have died of bird flu in Scotland may have just washed up there from the continent. The genetic signature of the swan's infection matches that of an outbreak in northern Germany.

In October 1996, the Ricoh GR series of 35mm film cameras was born. They were some of the company's first compact cameras aimed at the enthusiast and pro snapper where image quality and the resolving power of the lens were the paramount considerations, and not just a tiny package. A digital GR that aims to follow those illustrious forbears in terms of image quality, usability and sheer panache has its work cut out...

Salesforce.com is launching a hosted service bringing enterprise applications to wireless devices following its $15m acquisition of partner Sendia, announced on Tuesday. The hosted customer relationship management (CRM) vendor has announced AppExchange Mobile, which it said would allow more than 60 applications on the company's existing AppExchange service to be "quickly and easily" extended to mobile devices.